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The 100 Series Premiere Review: “Pilot” (Season 1, Episode 1)

Let’s start at the beginning. What is this show even about? Well, the CW took us back in time with its historical drama Reign this past fall, and now it’s taking us approximately 97 years into the future with The 100. Picture a real world version of Wall-E, except instead of the Earth being taken down by garbage, it was taken down by a nuclear war that killed most of the planet and made it unliveable; or so they thought. Those that survived were shuttled off to live in a space station, err, the combination of 12 space stations, to wait out the 200 years until research claimed that Earth would be inhabitable once more.

The only problem with this post-apocalyptic plan was that with every generation, so grew the population on the ‘Ark’ (the not so original name for the station housing the survivors/only hope for the human race), leading to a shortage of essential life support systems. In order to sustain enough life support to keep all the inhabitants alive, the leaders were forced to establish some pretty harsh laws – namely capital punishment for all crimes.

The only loophole to this law was that you had to be over 18 to be “floated” (the cutesy term for being floated to your death, literally). This loophole gave the ruling body one hundred offenders to test their theory (read: last hope) that Earth might be safe enough to return. Given the limited remaining life span of the station, there wasn’t much of a choice except to look for a miracle.

You read that correctly – the survival of the human race as they know it basically depends on 100 teenagers. What could go wrong with that?